Podcast 136 – “A Few Conclusions About Life”
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
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PROGRAM NOTES:
[NOTE: The following quotes are by Terence McKenna.]
"One has, you know, a window of opportunity somewhere between zip and a hundred to solve, or understand, or penetrate, or appreciate, or come to terms with the conundrum of being, this amazing circumstance in which we find ourselves, both individually and collectively."
"The intellectual tension that seems to work its way through this society almost like fat through meat is the tension between scientific reductionism and the deeply felt intuition of most people that there is a spiritual dimension, or a hidden dimension, or a transcendental dimension."
"So the conclusion that I reach, visa vie the individual and civilization, is this: Culture is not our friend. Culture is not your friend. It’s not my friend. It’s a very uncomfortable set of accommodations that have been hammered out over time for the convenience of institutions."
"Culturally defined reality is some kind of intelligence test, and those who are joining are failing the test."
"The imagination is a dimension of non-local information."
"And so, these are the things, the exploration of which, the singing about of which, makes us human beings. The exploration of the universe of the unseen is the business of human beings."
"And what is shamanism but philosophy with a hands-on attitude. Philosophy not made around the camp fire, but philosophy based on the acquisition of extreme experience. That’s how you figure out what the world is, not by bicycling around in the burbs, but by forcing extreme experience."
"What they [psychedelics] cause is what I’m advocating, a fundamental revaluation of cultural values, because culture as we’re practicing it currently is causing a lot of pain to a lot of people, and animals, and ecosystems, none of whom were ever allowed to vote on whether they wanted this process to go in this direction."
"What is happening, I think, it’s really bigger than psychedelics, it’s bigger than human evolution. We are not making the waves in this ocean. We are corks, riding the waves of the ocean. But we are privileged, by perhaps chance alone, to occupy a unique moment in the history of the universe. A moment when the universe goes through some kind of self-transforming, evolutionary, inflationary expansion. That’s what’s happening."
"This is what I believe: That we are not pushed from behind by the casual unfolding of historical necessity, but that we are in the grip of an attractor of some sort, which lies ahead of us in time."
"The shaman is a person who is able to transcend the dimensional confines of cultural existence. . . . Only the shaman knows that culture is a game. Everyone else takes it seriously. That’s how he can do his magic."
"There is no contradiction between technology and spirit. There is no contradiction between the search for intellectual integration and understanding and the psychedelic experience. There is no contradiction between ultra-advanced hyperspacial cyber culture and Paleolithic archaic culture. We have come to the end of our sojourn in matter. We have come to the end of our separateness."
"There is a morphological enfoldment occurring on this planet. It is bringing forth some entirely new order of being. We are a privileged part of this."
"The plants are the pipeline into the Gaian intention. It’s just not a coincidence that these plants carry this immense spiritual message. They are the pipeline of Gaian intentionality."
